You should probably massage the text in a plain text editor before bringing it in to word. Then you can replace an reformat any number of problem characters before unleashing Word to do its auto formatting.

In Windows I'd use the most excellent TextPad or a similar editor with great search and replace and stepped macro support. You can simply copy any offending character you don't know how to type and paste it into the search box. Very handy.

Such a plain text editor would also understand different line endings plus unicode and let you re-save the file with a different encoding and/or line endings. So you wouldn't even have to do any search-replce for linefeeds.